Create a List

List Name

List Name

Grades

Piccard (family)

The Swiss-born stratosphere
and deep-ocean explorer Auguste Piccard, b. Jan. 28, 1884, d. Mar.
24, 1962, with his associate Paul Kipfer, made (May 27, 1931) the first
manned balloon flight into the stratosphere, setting a new altitude record
of 15,781 m (51,775 ft). For this flight he designed the first pressurized
cabin. Hampered by equipment failures, the flight ended on an Austrian
glacier after 17 hours aloft. The following summer the same balloon took
Piccard and Max Cosyns to an altitude of 16,201 m (53,153 ft). This second
successful flight vindicated the project completely, and other countries
began constructing stratospheric balloons. Piccard continued to make flights
(27 in all) until 1937, when his interest turned toward exploring the
ocean bottom.

A physician by profession,
Piccard took ten years to build his first bathyscaphe, a free-moving vehicle
for deep-sea descents. Designed to float in water as a balloon floats
in air, by using ballast, it maneuvered with two propellers and could
stop in mid-dive. An unmanned dive to 1,388 m (4,554 ft) proved the basic
design. Financed by private industry, Piccard and his son, Jacques
(b. July 28, 1922), built a second bathyscaphe, the Trieste, and
in 1953 successfully dived to 3,150 m (10,330 ft).

At the time of his
death Auguste Piccard was designing a new vehicle, the mesoscaphe, to
range at 1,500 to 4,600 m (5,000 to 15,000 ft) and collect specimens.
His son completed the project and launched the Auguste Piccard
in 1964. A second mesoscaphe, built in 1968, traveled the Gulf Stream
from Florida to Cape Cod to study the current's marine life.

Between 1954 and 1956,
Jacques Piccard made six more dives, gathering valuable data and descending
to over 3,700 m (12,000 ft). In 1958 the U.S. Office of Naval Research
bought the Trieste. Two years later Jacques Piccard and Lt. Don
Walsh of the U.S. Navy descended 10,920 m (35,800 ft) to the bottom of
the Mariana Trench, the deepest place known beneath the sea.

Jacques Piccard's
son Bertrand, b. Mar. 1, 1958, inherited his grandfather's interest
in aerial exploration. In March 1999 the Swiss psychiatrist and his British
partner, Brian Jones, completed the first successful nonstop trip around
the world by balloon. The Breitling Orbiter 3 circumnavigated the
globe in about 20 days. This was Bertrand Piccard's third attempt at this
feat.